phtrivier (u/phtrivier)

phtrivier commented on MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake technologyreview.com/2026... · Posted by u/helloplanets

phtrivier · 14 hours ago

> Many people have pointed out that a lot of the viral comments were in fact posted by people posing as bots

Has "people posing as bots" ever appeared in cyberpunk stories ?

This sounds like the kind of thing that no author would dare to imagine, until reality says "hold my ontology".

phtrivier commented on France's homegrown open source online office suite github.com/suitenumerique... · Posted by u/nar001

virdev · 3 days ago

Lasuite Docs PM here. Awesome to see we’ve made it top the first page again! Thanks for the interest :)

I’ve compiled a bunch of answers in an FAQ on this doc https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/docs/ed2e1dbf-07a2-43bb-ae1e-...

Cheers!

phtrivier · 3 days ago

Honest question, though I suspect you won't be able to give a complete answer : how shielded are you from political changes ? When the next president takes office, and they're more aligned with Trump than the current administration, will it also cause a backlash ? Or do you feel shielded by the "we're cheaper than MS licenses" ?

phtrivier commented on Data centers in space makes no sense civai.org/blog/space-data... · Posted by u/ajyoon

beloch · 7 days ago

I would not assume cooling has been worked out.

Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot. A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos. A data center in space would necessarily rely completely on cooling by radiation, unlike a terrestrial data center that can make use of convection and conduction. You can't just pipe heat out into the atmosphere or build a heat exchanger. You can't exchange heat with vacuum. You can only radiate heat into it.

Heat is going to limit the compute that can be done in a satellite data centre and radiative cooling solutions are going to massively increase weight. It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic.

Musk is up to something here. This could be another hyperloop (i.e. A distracting promise meant to sabotage competition). It could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab. What it will not be is a useful source of computing power. Anyone who takes this venture seriously is probably going to be burned.

phtrivier · 7 days ago

> Musk is up to something here. This could be another hyperloop (i.e. A distracting promise meant to sabotage competition). It could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab. What it will not be is a useful source of computing power. Anyone who takes this venture seriously is probably going to be burned.

That.

Also, am I the only one to remember when SpaceX was supposed to pivot to transporting people from cities to cities, given how cheap and reusable and sure BFF/Starship was going to be ?

Or how we were all going to earn money by pooling our full self driving cars in a network of robo taxis ?

In all seriousness, what is the number of "unrealized sci-fi pipe dreams" that is acceptable from the owner a company ? Or, to be fair, what is the acceptable ratio of "pipe dreams" / "actually impressive stuff actually delivered (reusable rockets, starlink, decent EVs, etc...)" ?

phtrivier commented on xAI joins SpaceX spacex.com/updates#xai-jo... · Posted by u/g-mork

tyre · 8 days ago

Why is it cheaper to ship all of the materials to space, then to the moon for assembly (which also includes shipping all of the people and supplies to keep them alive), then back into space vs just…

building them on earth and then shipping them up?

We’re not exactly at a loss for land over here.

phtrivier · 8 days ago

> which also includes shipping all of the people and supplies to keep them alive)

What do you mean, "people" ? I'm pretty sure Musk is only expecting to send self-assembling Optimus robots [1] to do the whole manufacturing.

[1] "pre-order now, expected delivery any time soon"

(Oh, those times where you try to be sarcastic and realize: "wait, maybe that's the actual plan".)

phtrivier commented on Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native theregister.com/2026/01/3... · Posted by u/jamesblonde

thunfischtoast · 11 days ago

I once had a working program, running on a 4 GB RAM virtual server with MongoDB. Everything was fast and testing and deploying a new version took me some minutes usually. Existing users were happy as far as I could tell.

But then some corporate IT guy mandated everything had to be using managed AWS services in some three tier dev-test-production setup, despite having no prior experience with that on either side. Cost went up at least 25-fold, the development sucked, new deployments took 30? minutes minimum (because now everything has to run through some build-system I did not control and I had to manually copy keys around every time). I left the company, but I think the product exists to this day with less than 1000 customers. Nothing my 4 GB VS could handle...

phtrivier · 10 days ago

> Cost went up at least 25-fold,

I would love to write an email that start with "I can reduce cost 25 times by doing thing X" (the tricky part is hiding the fact that "X" is what you were doing before.)

phtrivier commented on Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media yle.fi/a/74-20207494... · Posted by u/Teever

riffraff · 10 days ago

90% of the people that spout racism, conspiracy theories, threaten people, etc.. on social networks use their real name and login with their phone number, there's no need to ask the social networks to get ID cards, if you are the government.

phtrivier · 10 days ago

I really doubt bots are using legitimate IDs.

The target for those age verification schemes (beyond actually preventing the kids' brains from being rotten by American ad supported skinner boxes) is probably to make schemes like IRA [1] just slightly more complicated. (I said "more complicated", I did not say "impossible" - I very much know that bot factories will find their ways around any kind of verification ; part of being on the defensive side of a conflict is about not giving up.)

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/19/airbus_sovereign_clou...

phtrivier commented on Direct Current Data Centers terraformindustries.wordp... · Posted by u/jk_tech

EQmWgw87pw · 11 days ago

It feels like you didn’t read your own link as he somewhat addressed your concern directly. The idea is simply that AI investment is an “up front cost” to future improvements. To debate against it you would have to provably explain why you think AI will not advance other technologies whatsoever.

phtrivier · 10 days ago

I usually don't try to prove things won't happen. I leave the burden of proof to the salesmen. In this case, they have extraordinary claims, so as the saying goes, I wait for extraordinary proofs.

So far they have failed to convince me.

phtrivier commented on Direct Current Data Centers terraformindustries.wordp... · Posted by u/jk_tech

phtrivier · 11 days ago

I'm curious about Handmeier's opinion on location of data centers.

Should they be close to the solar arrays (that is, in the desert, with data networks connecting them to were the tokens are used)

Or close to their customers (which mean far from the solar arrays, with electricity networks)

He's talking a lot about removing movable parts, but aren't the wires going to be an limiting factor ?

phtrivier commented on Direct Current Data Centers terraformindustries.wordp... · Posted by u/jk_tech

hjoutfbkfd · 11 days ago

if anything we are producing too much food

and what communications you find lacking?

phtrivier · 11 days ago

Food distribution is still a problem in vast part of the world.

Handling food waste is another issue.

Climate related shortage are coming soon for us (at the moment they only manifest as punctual price hikes - mustard a few years ago, coffee and chocolate more recently, etc...

https://www.euronews.com/green/2025/02/13/goodbye-gouda-and-...

https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/adverse-climatic-conditi...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/noelfletcher/2024/11/03/how-cli...

I don't know if the electricity going into compute centers could be put to better use, to help alleviate climate change impacts, or to create more resilient and distributed supply chains, etc...

But I would not say that this is "not a problem", or that it's completely obvious that allocating those resources instead to improving chatbots is smart.

I understand why we allocate resource to improving chatbots - first world consumers are using them, and the stock markets assume this usage is soon going to be monetized. So it's not that different from "using electricity to build radios / movie theater / TVs / 3D gaming cards, etc... instead of desalinating water / pulling CO2 out of the air / transporting beans, etc...

But at least Nvidia did not have the "toupet" to claim that using electricity to play Quake in higher res would solve world hunger, as some people claim:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnwerner/2024/05/03/sam-altma...

phtrivier commented on France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc. twitter.com/lellouchenico... · Posted by u/bwb

natas · 15 days ago

> France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

The odds that France will provide a competing offering is pretty high, because, in this day and age, and with AI, it's fairly straightforward to do so. The problem is adoption, do you think people in the USA or elsewhere will install it? Does that mean that only French companies and the French will be able to talk to eachother? Seems somewhat limiting and will limit business expansion.

Will the French government embed spyware in it, they can, since they'll be sponsoring this initiative, they've been intending to do with whatsapp and all the other messengers for years. Worrisome for the end user.

I'm all for competition, and I hope France succeeds in building a good product, because competition is great for everyone and creates jobs, and I hope it's going to take off soon, we'll see, bonne chance!

phtrivier · 15 days ago

The EU commission would be in an interesting position to mandate American platforms (AWS, Google Cloud, etc...) to support interoperability in order to avoid "market distortion".

Meaning the US based companies would bear _some_ of the burden of making it easier to ditch them, and switch to "sovereign" solutions.

The rest of the world would have a vested interest in letting this happen, since it would also reduce _their_ dependence on the US.

The question then becomes "what happens first":

1 - European commission pressuring the Irish government to send its police to seize AWS servers in Dublin (when fines are not enough any more)

2 - US administration pressuring the tech companies to shut down service in Europe (when threats are not enough any more)